Want to hear it?
Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!
The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.
Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example: AH0 TH IY1 N AH0 = a-THEE-na (Athena)
The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.
Quick Definition
A poem that adopts the voice or persona of a specific character, historical or fictional.
Explore this topic in depth (4)
Carpe Diem: Poetry and the Urgency of the Present
— Carpe diem poetry asks what we should do with a life that will not last forever. Explore its classical origins, its images of fleeting beauty, and the ways poets make urgency both appealing and open to question.
Figurative Language in Poetry
— Figurative language is not ornamental extra language: it is one of poetry’s ways of making connections and testing meanings. This guide introduces metaphor, simile, personification, apostrophe and related figures, with practical steps for reading how they develop across a poem.
Imagery in Poetry
— Imagery is the sensory language that helps a poem be felt as well as understood. This guide explains how to recognise different kinds of imagery and explore what they do without rushing past the words into interpretation.
Onomatopoeia in Poetry
— Onomatopoeia is the use of words whose sound suggests the noise, movement, or sensation they describe. In poetry, it can make a scene audible, shape a line’s rhythm, and connect a poem’s language to the physical world.
Detailed Definition
Ethopoeia requires ventriloquizing a distinct identity—real or imagined—through diction, perspective, and ethos; this constraint enables dramatic monologue or empathetic inhabitation, from Browning to persona poetry, and uses voice as formal boundary to explore subjectivity, alterity, and the performative nature of selfhood within poetic utterance.
Example
Example in poetry:
Ethopoeia (speech in character): Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues (“My Last Duchess”); Ovid’s “Heroides” voicing mythic women; persona poems like Ai’s criminal monologues; modern ethopoeia in Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen”; constraint poets adopt non-human voices (trees, algorithms); ethopoeia in historical ventriloquism.
Additional Notes
Ethopoeia is speech in another’s voice—dramatic monologue or persona poem. Browning and Ai are masters. Students develop empathy and ventriloquism. It’s key for historical or marginalized perspectives.